Refinery Hotel

Refinery Hotel

Background

Once a millinery factory with a Prohibition-era tea room attached, Refinery Hotel opened in 2013 after a multi-million-dollar overhaul by Stonehill & Taylor, the architecture firm behind the NoMad and Ace Hotels. Its 197 loft-like rooms and F&B venues, including the trendsetting Refinery Rooftop, repositioned the Garment District as a hangout spot for the city’s cool crowd. Two years after opening, refinery turned to Spherical to keep that momentum alive.

We designed and built a website for Refinery Hotel that feels as luxurious, stylish and refined as the hotel itself. With heavy use of original photography and video, plus a bold color scheme to match the property, our website brings the historic hotel to life online.

Spherical has worked to build awareness and showcase an overall cohesive identity on social that tells the hotel's unique history. We've actively sought out opportunities to stay relevant in the competitive Midtown hotel scene, and have continued to increasing the customer base on a large scale. Through engaging content creation and curation, we've established Refinery Hotel as a luxurious and stylish staple of the Garment District.

Our objective was to redefine the reputation of Midtown, and the Garment District specifically, in the eyes of New York’s cool crowd and the traveling elite who visit the city, while overcoming pre-existing notions of the neighborhood.

Dedicated to showcasing the neighborhood as an unsung bastion of culture and style, Refinery Times—devised, produced and managed by Spherical—features original photography and regularly updated content that introduces readers to the property, its stylish clientele and the neighborhood at large.

Refinery Times’s “In Bed With…” series is a key way for the brand to showcase its cool factor, featuring interviews with fashion influencers, entrepreneurs, designers and other thought leaders—tied together by a collective understanding of Midtown's reinvigorated style. Another series, “Midtown Musings,”spreads the love for the neighborhood, highlighting individual restaurants, bars and shops that fit with the hotel's mission to redefine the district as a fashion and culture hotspot.

Both series are published as visually, and performance-driven online articles, showcasing original photography produced by Spherical's in-house creative team. These assets are used on both Refinery Times and the hotel's social channels, creating a seamless aesthetic experience for readers and followers.

Spherical's photo shoots for Refinery Hotel have helped bring lifestyle photography to the hotel's website, editorial content and social feeds. Our “In Bed With…” series in particular has been an important way for Refinery to stay current with a micro influencer population, allowing us to photograph a broad collection of people, personalities, and entrepreneurs.